Peppermint Ornaments

Make it a candy Christmas this year with these cute little felt peppermint ornaments. They will last forever and you can use them year after year!

We are starting out the week with the last part of my candy Christmas ornament series. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have! Today we are learning how to make these absolutely adorable needle felted peppermint ornaments. This ornament is my favorite of all, which is why I saved it for last.

If you want to check out the other ornaments in my Christmas Candy series, here are the links:

These felt peppermints do take a little more time to make because you have to make quite a few of them. I am using them as ornaments, but you could also just throw them into a bowl for decoration or string them together and use as a fun garland for your tree or mantel! Any way you use them, you will need a handful of peppermints when all is said and done.

This is my second attempt at needle felting. If you are a regular around here, you may remember the sweet little needle felt peaches I made this summer. Since they turned out well, I decided to try my hand at something else. When I saw these charming peppermints on Etsy, I knew I wanted to try to make some myself.

Watch the quick video

Don’t want to read all the instructions? I have included a video in this post showing you how to make these peppermint ornaments. If you can’t see the video, turn off your ad blocker. Also, if you ever want to slow down the video, just click on the three dots in the lower right hand corner of the video and you can change the playback speed. If you want more detailed instructions, continue reading.

Supplies to make peppermint ornaments

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

White Wool Roving
Needle Felting Kit
Dark red embroidery thread
Large eye embroidery needle
Scissors
Circle templates – just cut out a 1½” and ½” circle from card stock

How to make a felt peppermint

The first step in making a needle felt peppermint is to make a needle felted disk shape. The wool you will use to create this disk is called wool roving and it is a long strand of wool fiber that has been processed but not yet spun into yarn. You can get it in all sorts of colors and from what I have read, roving wool is not all created equally. I used this same brand of wool for my peaches and I thought it worked really well but of course I don’t have anything to compare it to, so take that as you may.

The needle felting kit I bought came with three different sized needles, 36, 38 and 40 gauge. The higher the number, the finer the needle, so I used the 36 gauge needles to start working the wool and used the 40 gauge needle for the finishing work. The way these needles work to felt the wool is that they have little notches on them that catch the individual wool fibers and tangle them together as you poke the needle in and out. As you continue to work the wool this way, it gets more dense and smaller in size.

Tear off a large handful section of the wool. To do this, GENTLY spread apart the fibers. You won’t be able to grab it all at once and tear it apart. Work it apart a little at a time, slowly, and it comes apart like butter! This amount of wool made peppermints that are about 1½” in diameter and ½” in thickness.

Place your wool onto the felt pad that came with the needle felting kit. Just a tip, I have seen others use dense foam pieces instead as the wool sometimes sticks to the felt pad. The felt pad still works but if you have a spare piece of dense foam around that works really well. If you like Disney Loungefly mini backpacks, the packing foam piece that comes in the front pocket works perfectly! I used that for the peaches and it worked well. I just used the felt pad for these however.

Start poking the multi-tool with 36 gauge needles into the wool, going all the way through the wool. Turn the wool over and do the other side as well. You will notice that the fibers will start sticking together themselves and the shape will become flatter and more dense.

Just a warning, watch your fingers!! There are finger guards included in the kit and I did use those later as you will see. You will poke your fingers a couple times and yes, it does hurt! But you definitely get more careful about keeping your fingers out of the way. LOL! As I was working the wool, I started to poke into the sides too working my way around the disk shape.

As the disk became smaller, this is where the finger guards came in really handy! 😉 I was able to pick it up and work it into a disk shape better.

Add more wool if needed

If your peppermint is feeling a little small in thickness, you can always add more wool. Just pull a strand of wool apart and add it to the top of the peppermint. Work it into the peppermint in the same way using the needles. You can add some to the other side in this manner too!

Cut a template to use as a sizer

I cut a 1.5″ circle out of card stock to use as a sizer for my peppermints. Once I got them close to the size like in the picture below, I switched to the single needle holder.

In this single needle holder, I used the 40 gauge fine needle to do the finish work. This gives a smoother finish over the whole peppermint.

When you have smoothed out all the lumps and it looks like a peppermint, you are done with the needle felting part.

Add the peppermint stripes

I used red embroidery thread for the peppermint stripes. I tried one with just a single strand of embroidery thread but it did not look thick enough so I doubled over the thread and that was much better. Cut a length of doubled over thread to 20 inches long (so essentially a 40″ long piece folded in half). Tie a knot at the end.

I cut another circle out of card stock to use as a template. This time it was a ½” circle. This will be the space you will leave in the middle of the peppermint untouched, the red stripes will start around this circle. Pick a spot on the outside of the template and push your needle though the peppermint. Pull the thread all the way through until you hit the knot. The knot should keep it from going through the peppermint, you can try to bury the knot a bit, but don’t pull too hard because I accidentally pulled the knot through once. You do want to make sure your thread is pulled taut however.

Wrap the thread around the side of the peppermint and push the needle back down right above the knot. Angle the needle a bit so that you come out of the peppermint next to your first stripe. Keep holding the circle on the peppermint so that you know where to come out with the stripes.

Wrap the red thread around the side again and insert the needle next to the knot on the back. Angle the needle more this time so that you come out next to the previous stripe.

You want to try to evenly space the stripes. You will end up with ten stripes on each peppermint. This means that on each half you will have to space out 4 stripes in between the halfway stripes. The second half is easier to do because you can just line up the stripe you are working on directly across from the stripe on the other side.

Finish off the peppermint ornament

When you get to the end, you will have to knot the thread. I ended it on the same strand I started with, so there were knots in only one spot on the back to make it look as clean as possible. If any expert “needle felters” out there know of a better way to do this, I’m all ears! I would love to see those knots disappear. 🙂 When you are wrapping the last stripe around to the back of the peppermint, insert your needle where you want the last stripe to end but come out next to the first stripe right above the knot. Cut the thread off the needle, as close to the needle as possible so you have some ends to tie a knot.

Spread the threads apart and run one strand under the stripe. Tie the strands together in a knot and cut off the ends.

Now you have a finished felt peppermint. Cute, huh?

If you are making them into ornaments like I did, you can just add a piece of red thread onto one of the stripes to hang the peppermint ornament from.

Have fun making your peppermint ornaments

Since you are making quite a few of peppermint ornaments, it is a great time to listen to an audiobook or catch up on some mindless TV show that you can listen to. This is probably not a great craft for the kiddos to help with given the sharp needles, but they will absolutely love them, I am sure of it!

I will be back soon to finally share my Christmas tree that has all of these fun candy ornaments on them. Then I will share my other tree with a quick craft from that one as well! Whew! Time is running out! All of this, plus I still have a little shopping to do and all of the wrapping. I’m not stressing at all! Yeah right! 😉 Chat soon friends!